"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
04-29-2021, 09:10 AM (This post was last modified: 04-29-2021, 09:10 AM by Reave.)
i am the mace, the map, the fall and the high
The day had dawned unseasonably warm, mist rising from the snow until one could hardly see more than a nose-length ahead. To Reave, who had grown in the dense mists of the Taigan wood, it did not seem all that different from home. But there is a recklessness beating inside his breast. One that had taken root the day he’d been pieced back together on the beach.
It is painful to run, but that doesn’t stop him. Risk (they’d decided on Risk together, he and the juvenile raptor, though Reave is not entirely sure) keeps pace overhead, rising above the fog. It is as though they exist in two separate worlds. From above, the fog resembles clouds, blanketing the land in a mystical hush, as though hiding secrets of its own. For Reave, who barrels through the mists with a wild sort of abandon, any one of those secrets, terrible or otherwise, could be hiding just beyond the next blanket of white.
Here by the river, the snow churns into mud, making the terrain next to the fast-moving water treacherous and slick. It’s hard to count the number of times he nearly slips and tumbles, but he doesn’t slow. At least, not until the bank cuts away sharply where a creek joins the larger waterway.
He skids to a halt, gaze following the trail of the creek moments before he does too. But he does not race headlong this time, his steps instead more sedate as he tries to recapture the harsh breath in his lungs. Blood is oozing from the places where skin had torn away from the bone beginning to rupture through his skin, a soft glow gentling the otherwise harsh reality of his lanky form. After a moment, the muted sound of feathers causes him to pause, gaze lifting to the trees that exist only as indistinct, hulking shapes above him. Moments later, Risk settles onto Reave’s hip, claws digging into his skin as wide wings flare to steady the raptor.
It is the broken skin that draws her to him.
(Because there is so much broken beneath the thick layer of ice, her own skin chapped, such a soft blue light glowing where it is cracked and fraying. It would bleed, certainly, were it not frozen.)
She shrouds herself in snow to ward off the heat of the day, lets it gather thick along her spine, catch in her frozen mane and tail (tangled as they are in this state). She brings with her such a terrible cold, a stark contrast to the unseasonable warmth, and she approaches with her head tilted.
Of the four daughters, she was always the coldest.
Even before.
Before the darkness seized her and decorated her with ice.
Before she awoke one morning sometime later and found that she had become what she had been meant to be all along.
But she is not cruel, Camellia. Do not mistake her curiosity for malice. Do not think the way she rakes those pupil-less eyes across the bone erupting from his skin is anything other than a sort of peculiar interest. She has never seen such a thing, you see.
For a time, she does not speak, only studies, offering only a passing glance at the juvenile bird as snow accumulates around them, their breath erupting in plumes. (Winter has made her strange. But such extremes have a way of doing that.)
“Does it hurt?” she asks finally, reaching out to touch the bone without bothering to ask permission. Just barely. She does not know yet if the ice she’s made of is cold enough to be painful to the touch. She has not touched anyone, has not bothered.
The snow arrives first. As his bone-capped ribs heave, he eyes it with a banked curiosity, wondering just when the mist and fog had given way to snow. Then she arrives, the center of her own small blizzard. Snow begins to accumulate around them, clinging to the peaks of his glowing bone even as it does to her ice-encapsulated skin. He eyes her with an undisguised inquisitiveness, wondering at this creature of snow and ice who had taken such an unexpected interest in him.
For a while, she does not speak. The only evidence of their mutual lives are the sounds of their breathing and the plumes that rise from each exhale. Reave does not feel the need to fill the silence, instead watching her as she does him. As the large raptor does from Reave’s hip, predatory gaze fixed, the feathers of his ruff raised in interest.
When she finally does speak, her words almost startle him. For a time, he thought they might simply stare at one another in silence, until either one grew tired or they froze that way for eternity. ‘Does it hurt?’ she asks, and for a moment, the bone-clad stallion struggles to place her meaning. But when her nose touches the glowing bone, he shifts, dried blood cracking as he recalls his gruesome appearance.
A slow smile begins to grow on his lips then.
“Yes,” he replies with simple honesty, vibrant blue gaze fixed on her. “But so do many things in life.” He tilts his head then, eyeing her with a matching evaluation, almost impersonal in nature. “I could ask the same of you.”
He smiles and perhaps this would have perturbed her if she were not such a strange thing herself. (For doesn’t it take a troubled thing to smile when confronted with the reality of pain? Are troubled things not meant to be feared?)
He smiles and the pupil-less eyes do not shift from the place where the bone erupts from the skin. The bone glows, she notices, and this is a peculiar thing but she is also a peculiar thing. In fact, is there a thing in Beqanna that is not peculiar? He does not flinch away from her, so she does not draw away. Instead, she traces the bone from the place where it starts to the place where it ends. She wonders if this is what the bone of her own shoulder looks like, underneath the ice and the cracked skin. She wonders if her own bones are made of ice, if there are any bones left at all.
Out of the corner of her own eye she sees him tilt his head but she does not return his gaze as she continues her assessment of all that bone, all that dried and drying blood. (Does it transfer to the ice of her mouth?) She does not smile the way he had smiled when he challenges her about her own pain. Instead, she finally lifts her head and turns to meet his eye. (Notice how both gazes are such a vibrant blue.)
“If it does, I have not noticed,” she tells him honestly. If there is any pain at all it is numbed by the cold of it. The armor of the ice works both ways, protecting her both from others and from herself. She shifts her weight and returns to her appraisal of the bone, though she does not reach out to touch him again.
“What else hurts?” she asks, head tilted in question.
He doesn’t retreat from her exploration, instead eyeing her with an open and unfeigned interest. Neither does he shy away from the chill of her skin sinking deep into his bone, numbing the torn edges of his own flesh. It’s a strange thing, that she is both living and yet somehow made of ice and snow. But then, Beqanna is filled with strange things. With things who should not exist yet somehow do.
Reave has seen enough of them to know that this is not nearly so odd as it could be.
When she withdraws, the skin along his ribs and spine shiver, shaking off the faint tingle her icy touch had left behind. Blue eyes clash against blue as they stare at each other, her lips as still and unsmiling as his are mobile and expressive, her icy temperament an intriguing foil to the lightning of his own. Two opposing forces meeting so unexpectedly.
It takes him a moment to realize why she is so intriguing. Just what it is about her that drags at his curiosity. She is difficult to read. Her emotions are as her skin and eyes, sparing him so few memories to glut upon. He wonders then what he might see if he were to step into her sight, if he were to peek through all that she has seen. Would they be as cold and adrift as she now appears, or would he find something else? Something entirely surprising?
What else hurts? she asks, and Reave flicks his ears idly, not certain how he is supposed to answer that. He has never paid overly much attention to the things in life that cause discomfort. If anything, he has long preferred to avoid them. They are there, of course, lurking. Waiting. He can feel them if he considers it too closely. But they are not physical hurts.
“Would you like to see?” he asks, offering to answer in the only way he knows how. But would she truly care to take a walk in his most painful memories?
It does not take long for the snow to gather at her feet, an inch deep. And she likes the way the bones look in it, white on white. The blood such a stark contrast, red on white.
He is a peculiar thing, she thinks, and she decides that she likes this about him. She does not know his name but she knows his bones. She knows his blood. It is not wet, not as she knows blood to be, but it flakes off on her lips. Blood on ice. (She would bleed, too, if the skin were not so cold. If it did not freeze as soon as it cracked.)
Does she want to see? Will he hurt her? She wants to see what the bones look like, her bones. Can he show her that? They are each swimming in deep blue oceans, the eyes of each other. She does not look away and he does not either. This is not a joke and it does not appear to be a test. There is no hint of a joke in the way he asks it. (Is there malice? Cruelty? Does it matter? The ice is impenetrable, as far as she can tell. She can call upon the fierceness of winter to protect herself, she knows that. She does not fear him, though he had laughed at the concept of pain.)
She blinks at him, takes a single step backward away from him. Not because she is afraid but because she wants to get a better look at him. At the whole of him. All that bone, all that blood. How it hurts, how so many things hurt. How will he show her?
She nods. “Yes,” she says, so that he will have her answer in no uncertain terms. She does not brace herself. She stands there and she waits, the snow continuing to fall around them. It gathers around her ankles now, her nostrils flaring.
If what he asked is cruel, he doesn’t realize it. The concept of cruelty is something he has paid little attention to, though he has seen enough of it by now. It’s an odd fact of life, but when those who do it purposefully are relatively few in number, it’s hard to see it as anything more than a vagary of emotion. Or as anything beyond a fight for survival. Even the monsters he had understood. They had been doing all that they knew. Is it cruel if they were unable to be anything but what they had been?
So when he stares at her with eyes full of knowledge no one his age should possess, it is not with dark intentions.
She agrees, and a smile touches Reave’s expressive lips. He says nothing, but his eyes gleam with a strange light in the moments before he pulls her into the maelstrom of his own emotional memories. It is an almost primal thing, but when his first memories had been pain, it almost has to be. He hadn’t quite understood them then, but he does now. He knows there is grief in his confusion as the memories of his first moments surge between them. Some are his and some are his mothers’ (the both of them), but it hardly matters. There is a boy (him, newly born, red and white and gangly limbs with no hint of bone) and there is the woman who had birthed him.
Her last breath had shuddered and a crack had spread through Lilli’s heart. He had felt it as his own, though he hadn’t known then that it had been shared. There is pain in that grief, pain enough that it almost feels as though he would splinter from the inside out. Pain that spreads even as the stone spreads across Brazen’s still form. Pain that burns as the small nose of a newborn colt presses desperately against the cold, hard shoulder. As though he might still nudge her awake.
When he withdraws, shaking the memory free, his eyes are flat and cold. As though that alone could shield him from what lay in his past. There is more, but he is not ready to awaken that beast yet.
When he has finally shaken the miasma from his thoughts, he peers at her with a quizzical eye, though there is something more dangerous lurking alongside it now. “Have you felt that kind of hurt before?” he asks abruptly, refusing to linger. Still, there is genuine curiosity in his voice. “Or are you numb to that too?”
He does not hesitate. (Though, had she really thought he would?)
It is a memory, she understands this without knowing how. Except that the child looks like him before the eruption of all that bone. And this is his mother? It must be, given the way grief grips them -- all three of them, the two left behind and her, too, the interloper. But she feels it only because they feel it. She feels it only because he wants her to feel it. This is what hurts. Losing your mother in the dawn hours of your life. She cannot relate.
The child nudges its mother but it is no use. This is what hurts. This is the kind of pain that seizes the heart, arrests the air in the lungs. This is the kind of pain that you have no choice but to carry with you through the rest of your life, she realizes.
And then he blinks and the memory dissolves around them and they are grown and he is no longer that child and she can no longer feel the grief sloughing off him in waves. There is something in the eyes, though. Or, rather, the lack of something in the eyes. A stretching nothingness. As if he is suddenly keeping something from her. She studies them, those eyes, and shakes her head.
“No,” she answers honestly. She does not know what it means to lose someone, let alone her mother. Could she numb herself to it now? She could not have numbed herself to it as a child, before. Before the winter consumed her. Became her. It sounds like an accusation and one corner of her mouth quirks upward in a knowing smile.
“I was not always numb,” she tells him. (Is she numb now? Or is she only cold?) “Certainly if I had lost my mother at that age, I would not have been okay either.”
It’s a strange thing, watching the aftermath of her reaction to his most ancient memory. There are curls of her own now, whispers of a childhood in which she stood as something else - not the creature made of cold and snow and ice that she is now. He recognizes it. She had changed, just as he had. But rather than the future flooding the back of her mind as it had for him, the iciest reaches of the north had flooded her.
She speaks of that time, before she had grown numb, and it makes him wonder. Does she look at him now and see a boy grown into a young man who is not okay? Those memories had been formative ones. Had created the wild recklessness that still courses through his body - his very bones - to this day. It is a hungry beast, always desiring more. Did that make him not okay?
“She came back,” is his reply. “When I was older.” His eyes gleam with something strange, almost feral as he watches her, but it is quickly replaced by a wry flippancy. “I suppose that makes everything okay.”
He shifts, suddenly restless in the somber chill that had suffused the air around them. He does not care for this scrutiny of his past, not quite sure now what had possessed him to show her that memory. It had been foolish and careless. So he changes the subject, pushing it back on her with little finesse. “Does it bother you, not being able to feel things like you used to?”
